Laughter Power. Peter Carroll and Chaos Magick

What does laughter have to do with magick?

Quite a bit, apparently.

In this solo episode of Hangin’ with Mist3rDouglas, I dig into Peter J. Carroll’s Liber Null & Psychonaut and isolate something that kept jumping out at me: Carroll brings up laughter again and again as an actual tool of magical practice.

Not simply because occultism could use a sense of humor, although, come on.

Carroll uses laughter in connection with banishing attachment, sigil work, gnosis, broken expectations, belief, emotional states, frightening visions, paradox, and even the way a magician receives the outcome of a working.

And that got me wondering whether laughter might be something more useful than comic relief.

Maybe it’s part of the equipment.

A little bug spray and WD-40 for attention and attachment.

Something that helps us explore wilder territory without becoming completely captured by whatever frame, belief, experience, entity, revelation, synchronicity, or "very important glowing lady" happens to show up.

We get into:

• Who Peter Carroll is and why Liber Null & Psychonaut matters to chaos magick • Why Carroll calls laughter an antidote to magical imbalance • Laughter as a banishing tool after sigil work • Humor, surprise, and the shattering of expectation • Why Carroll connects laughter with belief and psychological flexibility • Laughter in altered states and anomalous experiences • “Laugh at the terrifying vision” as a form of maintaining agency • Carroll’s ideas around Kia, gnosis, and Gnosticism • Humor, paradox, and “emotional engineering” • Doing everything possible on the physical plane before adding magick • My own 1 minute, 11 second laughter practice before stressful or uncertain situations • Why Frasier may secretly be an occult teaching document

I take this stuff seriously.